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Gnome 3 Review

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Review of Gnome 3 powered by the Slant community.

GNOME 3 is an easy and elegant way to use your computer. It is designed to put you in control and bring freedom to everybody. GNOME 3 is developed by the GNOME community, a diverse, international group of contributors that is supported by an independent, non-profit foundation.

Pros

Pro

Clean UI

Every aspect of GNOME 3 has been crafted to fit together as a harmonious whole, so that it offers a consistent and integrated experience.

Pro

Simple and easy to use

GNOME 3 has been designed to make it simple and easy to use. Press a button to view your open windows, launch applications or check if you have new messages.

Pro

Does not get in the way

GNOME 3 lets you do the things you want without getting in the way. It won't bother you or badger you with demands, and it has been designed to help you comfortably deal with notifications.

Pro

Powerful search

A powerful search feature lets you access all your work from one place.

Pro

Great for high dpi displays

Adjustable scaling factor makes it great for high-resolution laptops and far away TVs.

Pro

Highly customisable

Gnome Extensions offers an easy way to extend the built-in functionality.

Pro

Keyboard friendly

It's (mostly) usable without touching a mouse, so you can keep your hands on the keyboard.Shortcuts can be defined in the gnome setting.There are even more shortcuts available when using the gesetting or dconf tool, e.g. switch to desktop 5 to 9.

Pro

Easy theming

Changing the look (and feel) of Gnome Shell is easy, shell theme, icon, windows and graphical elements (gtk) individually for each user.Mostly it's installing some packages or unpacking some archive to a themes folder and using selecting the new theme in e.g. gnome-tweak-tool.There are a lot of really good themes on DeviantArt.

Pro

Adheres to standards

Allowing for interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops.

Pro

Very productive

With a clean layout and well-thought keyboard shortcuts, Gnome 3 is simply the best for people looking to be productive with their computer.

Pro

Online account management

GNOME 3 integrates with your online accounts, so that all your data can be accessed from the same place.

Pro

Great task manager

The GNOME Task Manager is great, showing all open processes with every needed detail. For each process you can see the amount of memory and processing power that it's using, along with the process priority.

Pro

Wayland support

Gnome is the first desktop environment that uses Wayland as default instead of X server. X server is only optional currently.

Pro

It just works

You don't ever "need" tweaks. Unless your device is too outdated, it just works out of the box. Touchscreen, 4k TV, anything just works.

Pro

Gnome-Tweak-Tool is great

Gnome may seem bland out of the box but, the Gnome-Tweak-Tool is awesome.

The Gnome-Tweak-Tool allows for easy desktop tweaks and other control functionality, and that these features can be activated with just a click.

Pro

Touchscreen friendly

It works well with any touchscreen-enabled system, including newer laptops, even to the point of including a well-designed on-screen keyboard.

Pro

Integrates with most Google Services

You can use your calendar, drive, contacts and most of Google services with Online Account option. You can show your Google Calendar events on the Gnome's default calendar app, Nautilus (Default file manager of GNOME) almost fully integrated with Google Drive and even you can read your PDF's with Evince (the default built-in PDF reader in GNOME).

Pro

All the major players in the Linux ecosystem have finally collated on Gnome

This doesn't mean the others go away, it just means there is a colossal community and industry backing behind Gnome.

The point whether or not it being technically the best option is now off table and irrelevant. It is now the de facto standard. Like it or not.

Pro

High resultion screens, multi monitor, content creation

If you depend on high resultion screens, multi monitor, or content creation programs you want Gnome.

Pro

Highly stable

Gnome isn't obviously devoid of flaws, but it's pretty stable - especially in comparison with the KDE Plasma Desktop, which can literally fall apart after installing upgrades (and show a considerable number of error messages) or for whatever reasons - after turning on the computer you can end up without (Plasma) desktop altogether, which I believe IS quite unproductive. It is also noteworthy that many other major desktop environments are based on Gnome, and among these are: Cinnamon, Pantheon and (now dead) Unity.

Pro

Graphic apps 'feel smoother' on gnome than on KDE plasma

Graphics apps 'feel smoother' on gnome than on KDE plasma. Example: Gimp and inkscape, probably because they are developed in gtk+.

Cons

Con

Slow

GNOME 3 desktop environment is kinda slow on some Linux distributions

Con

Continuous customization and extension issues

They need to sort out their continuous customization and extension issues, which are why many people still prefer KDE or other Desktop environments.

Con

Extension system is weakly integrated into the environment

Backward compatibility is not guaranteed and extensions seems like second class citizens in the GNOME environment.

Con

Some settings are not where the user would expect it

E.g. it is not possible to change the keyboard auto-repeat delay or rate from the usual All Setting > Keyboard like, for example, in Unity.

Many settings are considered "tweaks" and require installing a separate utility to adjust.

Further still, some settings are buried in a dconf database.

Con

Longtime support is hard since every few years GNOME changes its own standards

Everytime something is complete GNOME breaks itself:

Icon naming changes almost every 3 years : once gtk icons were named stock_edit then gtk-edit then edit-edit and currently edit-edit-symbolic

App icons change also every few years currently they get renamed to an android like scheme eg: org.gnome.Photos.svg instead of gnome-photos.svg however this breaks all common standards esp. since filenames on linux are case sensitive.

GNOMEShell extension also break on almost every release.

Currently Gtk3 has been stabilized however they are already working on GTK4 and 5 so in the worst case your desktop will need to run and support 4 GTK-toolkits at the same time.

Con

Full screen start menu

This may be fine if your screen is really small, but on modern fullhd desktop it looks ugly and distracting. In addition to very ineffective display of items on screen - much more could be placed on one screen if there were less empty space around and between icons

Con

Tightly coupled to its window manager

If you're looking to run an alternative window manager, like XMonad, you're pretty much out of luck.

Con

Extensions can break whole Gnome desktop

Gnome extensions have a lot of freedom to customize the desktop, and it means that extensions can break your desktop leaving you unable to use your computer. Also extensions can significantly slow down whole desktop.

Con

Poor 'drag and drop into application' capability

Difficult to drag and drop a file into an open application.

Con

Some GUI controls are much larger than on other desktops

This is wasting screen space on non-HiDPI monitors.

Con

Native Gnome dock isn't scalable

The native Gnome dock isn't scalable, which means if you want to change its size you have to download a customized theme for the shell and hope it has the appearance you want. Honestly again just like the icon issue it wastes way too much of the screen on high resolution monitors.

Con

Icon scalability and sorting

The icons in the "apps view" area don't have any additional sizes, the current ones are much too large to be effective for the screen space they use. Also, there is no native way to sort them in Gnome, only a very limited extension. Which means you're pretty much always better off using the search bar if you can.

Con

Rather insane method of wallpaper slideshows

Most DEs and WMs allow the user to simply point to a directory, and use pictures from there. Gnome 3 requires the rather asinine idea of building an XML file to accomplish the same thing.

Con

Con

Depends on systemd

Some people don't like systemd but it is part of most modern distros anyway.

Con

Has several dead userspace features that are supplemented by community supported exstentions.

Has several dead projects that are supplemented by community supported exstentions. Unfortunately the gnome updates often break these exstentions. Example: GSConnect.

Con

Non-intuitive use paradigm

It doesn't feature an always-on dock and fixed amount of usable desktops, doesn't support tray icons for background programs. The main interaction with running programs bases on clicking and dragging (to a desktop) preview thumbnails.

Con

Inconsistent desktop

As of GNOME3, some applications have ClientSideDecorations while other use normal Titlebars, this also affects usablity since both Decorations do different things if you left, right, or double click it. Same goes for Menubars. Some Apps follow the GlobalMenu in the GNOMEShell while others don't.

Con

Shell-Style ≠ Widget-Style

The GNOME-shell is unable to use the current GTK style for its interface thus making it hard to get a consistent user interface.

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